NationStates

The years PS 219 to PS 273 (1844 to 1898 by Gregorian reckoning) are regarded as the height of the Freehold's pre-present power, wealth, and cultural achievements. Coinciding alongside a series of expansions and conquests, the beginning of the age is marked with the annexation of the last Selian state into the Freehold barring Pontus, which had quickly emerged as the Freehold's fellow Selian rival. Other scholars place the beginning of the golden age a lot earlier however, to PS 182 (1807), coinciding to the initiation of said conflicts and the beginning of what is generally agreed to be a far more rapid projection of power than had been seen since the Freehold's founding. These annexations granted the Freehold dominion over the entire heartland of Selia and 'Further Selia', a non-specific term referring to lands outside of the peninsula with historic Selian colonisation, in this case primarily Anatolia. The annexation brought Ephyra into border and further diplomatic contact with the Muslim powers of the east, beginning a period of extensive trade, as well as conflicts.

Mediterranean, Tartary, and Arabic trade routes became major sources of slave import and export for the Freehold, who purchased when deficient, but often sold at open markets following conquest and the reduction of large portions of the conquered people into slavery. This vast economic growth fuelled Ephyra as a cross-roads trading point of east and west, and the Freehold's military power was bolstered to protect these routes, borders, and in times to expand them. By the end of the golden age the Freehold had taken possession of much of the Levant coastline and a significant portion of the Hinterlands, as well as making gains into the Euphrates river valley. The golden age slowly came to end as Ephyra began to lack behind its contemporaries, especially in Europe, with a significant contributor to this decline in economic and military power being attributed to the rise of the Washingtonian navy in the Atlantic, expanded and advanced to counter Ephyral slaving operations in the ocean. What was initially born out of a desperate attempt to recover losses brought by the Russian strangulation of the Tartary trade emerged as a major market, with pirates, corsairs, slavers, and other sea-going organisations both of Ephyral citizen and foreign descent took to the Atlantic to capture vessels, hold them for ransom, or take the cargo as prize and crew to be sold as slaves. These operations expanded to direct attacks on Washingtonian coastal settlements in the New World, with a number of small villages and even significantly sized towns looted for captives, especially a growing demand for young Washingtonian women, to be taken back and sold into slavery. The expansion of the Washingtonian fleet and the technological superiority of their ships over the Freehold's rendered the Atlantic trade unprofitable, and trade became largely confined to internal trade and with the Arabs. Other factors abound, including a number of military defeats, corruption within the Senate, and increased centralisation of power within the provincial governors effectively turning provinces into semi-independent kingdoms.

The factors that saw the decline of the Freehold from PS 273 onward eventually culminated in the Ephyral Civil War breaking out in PS 308 (1933), waged until PS 315 (1940) with the proclaiming of Anomedes Gorgosios Lenaleos as Archon Dictator for a term of ten years. Immediately following the civil war, a multi-front invasion by the Soviet Union and their Karthspiri allies, alongside the betrayal of the client kingdom of Armenia, continued Ephyral involvement in conflict alongside its allies (Pontus, Germany, and others) for a further six years until the war was resolved with an anti-Soviet victory in PS 321 (1940). The victory saw the effective crushing of resurgent internal threats, the dismantling and annexation of the Armenian kingdom, and of hundreds of thousands of captives taken as slaves from Karthspire and Armenia.

Following the end of Lenaleos' term in PS 325 (1950), elections were reinstated. The Senate having been purged of its corrupt elements, the provincial governors weakened by enforcing a maximum of three years in office, victory over internal and external threats, and a reversal of what was beginning to look like a loss of civic virtue and the ancestral mores, has cultivated within the Ephyral citizenry a belief that the Freehold is either now in or destined for a second golden age. Comparisons are already being drawn between the saving actions of Lenaleos to the Freehold's founder, Artalos, who also took power for the good of the Ephyral people and returned it to them once the task was complete. The events of the last decade are even being referred to as the Second or New Ephyral Spring, to draw purposeful links between Ephyra's modern revival in power and its initial founding.